White Plains CitizeNetReporter - <i>The Scoop:</i>Knights Without Armor in A Savage Land

The kidnapping of Dan Pearl, Wall Street Journal reporter highlights the world's most dangerous profession: reporter. Of course, the inquiring press are not police, soldiers or private detectives, but those heros and heroines carry protection. The inquiring reporter ventures into enemy territory unarmed with pencil, tape recorder, and digital camera, and has only his or her faith in the reliability and dubious decency of their sources as protection.

The reporter is not greeted with good cheer when we approach subjects. Nervousness ensues. Ingenuousness is not uncommon. A number of subjects have something to hide, or a personal agenda that might be compromised by the truth, and, shudder, the very concept of giving a reporter a "straight" answer.

I have to tell you that no one likes the truth because it puts them in the true perspective in the public eye. Why does the press make errors? Because subjects are not forthcoming. They use the reporter when they feel like using him. Leak stories to other media when they feel it is to their advantage. Ask you to hold stories, tell you things off the record, and do everything, including lying to hide the truth of virtually every matter, (regardless of how mundane or harmless) from you, the public.

Reporters only are respected after they have discovered a universally accepted "spin." Woodward and Bernstein, the Watergate reporters, became famous after the Watergate hearings had vindicated their original reporting. Karen Silkwood, became martyred after she was murdered. Victor Riesel had to be blinded by an acid-throwing mob attacker before the public believed his crusading reporting on the corruption of the Teamsters in the 1950s. Walter Winchell was severely criticised by the Liberal press for his early “outing” of Adolf Hitler as anti-Semitic and dangerous.

Sadly, the lonely investigative reporter is not welcomed at all, and is only mourned by the press who realize just how dangerous real reporting is. Pearl is the latest example of a reporter trying to get at the truth and perhaps paying for it with his life.

What Pearl was doing in Pakistan when he was abducted was trying to get an exclusive interview, and he went alone to meet some less than savory Pakistani types. Now he is among the missing. You cannot imagine how hard that is to do to expose yourself like that not knowing who you are dealing with. I liken it to undercover work, with one exception, they know who you really are. Sometimes the reporter can hide the fact he or she is a reporter. I do sometimes, but it's hard to be believable. You have to ask just a few questions, and not too many.

On the other hand, there is a thin line between investigating and conducting a vendetta to prove a point. Following avenues of inquiry wherever it may lead may uncover some things that hurt everyone. Judgment has to be used.The art of investigative reporting to expose wrongdoing before people were hurt by the wrongdoing, has been lost, thanks to the legal profession.

Nowadays, swarms of reporters are turned loose on stories after the damage has been done. It's amazing what they find out with just a little digging. But, isn't it surprising that they never find out before a disaster hurts everybody? Major media specialize in investigative reporting after the horse has left the barn.

Enron: Where was the press before Enron went down? Mesmerized by glamour and glitz no doubt. Today's press at the major papers is naive. Remember the Dot.Com boom? I cannot remember any critical articles predicting the dot com business plan did not make sense.

Generally what passes for investigative reporting today is a vendetta. Reporters are told to collect information supporting a certain point of view, which is really easy to do. However, when a reporter goes out to find out about something, he or she has to examine all sides of the issue.

Examine claims, see if they hold up. Let facts do the talking, ignore giving speculation the same gravitas as fact. You can make a case for any speculation if you talk to activists against the issue. You have to check their statements.

The latest Indian Point controversy was fueled shamelessly by politicians seeing a way to curry favor with voters by showing concern for their welfare. Ever since a local story wrote of Indian Point "melting down," it has brought anti-nuclear power interests back from their graves like a legion of long dead Draculas.

According to Entergy and a nuclear engineer source of WPCNR’s, Indian Point cannot melt down because the fuel is not "weapons grade," and there are backup systems in place that were not at Chernobyl. That was not reported in the original “meltdown” scare in September.

Talk has escalated to the point where the politicians want to replace Indian Point with a natural gas powered plant and purchase electricity from other power regions without any handle on how this would affect electricity rates. How irresponsible is that? Study it, yes.

The folly is that even if Indian Point were to close tomorrow, as Governor Pataki pointed out, and Comptroller H. Carl McCall agreed with him, Tuesday, the fuel rods would still be there for around a decade for any cowboy terrorist to dive a plane into for ten years. Converting the plant will not eliminate this threat until the United States figures out where to ship the fuel rods, and how.

To do that they have to get past the same environmental elitists who will complain bitterly about how the rods are shipped to the caves in the West, that the government wants to store them in. Oh, did I tell you the “Enviros” still to do not agree that is the right site? And, oh, yes, we, the taxpayers would have to pay Entergy for the conversion.

I have a solution: Let’s put anti-aircraft guns on the domes. Manned 24 hours a day. That should do it. But, I’m sure the anti-rifle people would be up in arms.

Indian Point is a bogus issue, sustained by "what if?" speculation fanned by self-righteous favor-currying politicians to rouse the public who have not done their homework. Arousing hysteria is not investigative reporting or responsible leadership.

Not once has the fuel rod storage problem that makes Indian Point a target regardless of whether it’s working or not, been explained in the media. Except when WPCNR wrote it last fall. The New York Times reported it in its Westchester Section Sunday (and Governor Pataki mentioned it in a speech recently), that closing the plant does not remove the threat posed by the fuel rods. That is not good investigative reporting not to have revealed that little old problem of fuel rods lying around all along.

Evacuation plans? Of course they are going to be hard to execute. Perhaps the one good thing that has come out of the evacuation plan criticism is the revelation of the County directive that parents should not drive to schools to pick up their children. This ignores human nature. How does evacuation work? It worked pretty well during the Twin Tower disaster. People just walked North.

Reporting is not what it once was. Because there is not as many of us. In fact, reporters might be actually liked more today by the public than they were in the early years of newspapering in this country, when they asked tougher questions, were suspicious of all they were told, and received far rougher treatment from officials than they do today.

There were a lot more reporters with twelve newspapers in New York alone.

Real investigative reporting is a dangerous job. It does not mean interviewing advocates for a point of view, it involves digging out facts over a period of time. And, you are often running against a “storylife” in doing so. Putting yourself at risk as Mr. Pearl did. And, sometimes, dying for the truth.


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